First into Nagasaki
George Weller, , read by Stefan Rudnicki. . Blackstone Audio, $29.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-7861-6581-0
Rudnicki reads Weller's reports of life in the ravaged city of Nagasaki in the final moments of World War II with a quiet authority—one perfectly suitable for the veteran journalist's forceful, never-before-published testimony of the atomic bomb and its terrible destruction. Traveling through a defeated, battered Japan, Weller's dispatches—originally censored by Gen. Douglas MacArthur—reveal the results of a war of ceaseless brutality and its seemingly inevitable atomic finale. Weller meets ordinary Japanese brutalized by the war and explores a country only just emerging from its worst moments. Rudnicki carefully assesses each of Weller's words (collected by his son), preserving their gravity and their well-measured, colorful authority. His reading gives a punch and immediacy to Weller's solidly constructed first-person reports on the horrors of war. The result forcefully documents a superb war correspondent's eyewitness testimony.
Reviewed on: 02/26/2007
Genre: Audio
Analog Audio Cassette - 978-0-7861-4841-7
Analog Audio Cassette - 978-0-7861-4715-1
Hardcover - 320 pages - 978-0-307-34201-0
MP3 CD - 978-0-7861-7324-2
Paperback - 352 pages - 978-0-307-34202-7